


Rise Up

by gamb



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon Relationships, Except Bolas, Eye Trauma, Gen, Post-War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2020-05-13 17:22:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19255738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamb/pseuds/gamb
Summary: Gideon Jura knows a false god when he sees one.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AwesomePossum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwesomePossum/gifts).



> For L. Thanks for the inspiration.

For a moment Gideon knew nothing but whiteness and the smell of ash and metal.

A scream startled him back to consciousness.  He pushed himself upright, and slipped in his own blood as he stood.  Stars burst and faded in his vision. The citadel--yes, he was on top of the citadel; Bolas's massive, clawed feet scored grooves in the metal a mere dozen paces in front of him, close enough that Gideon could've counted each scale, had he wished to.  Close enough to rush in and stab, had he a weapon. The dragon had short legs, Gideon noted woozily. He looked down.

He'd still had Blackblade when he fell, hadn't he?

The scream echoed out again, more agonized this time, and Gideon whirled in search of its source.  Liliana, a half-dozen yards away, caught aflame. She was staring at him, Gideon was certain, though her eyes were lost in the fire and the penumbral glow of the Chain Veil.  Spirits flew from the Veil and moved to swarm the dragon, attempting to protect their bearer. Incorporeal fists beat on black-bronze scales; if they accomplished anything at all, Gideon couldn’t see it.  Bolas batted them away like mosquitoes.

Gideon took a step toward Liliana--but there was nothing he could do.  He took another step anyway, and his foot hit something. He had dropped what remained of Blackblade when he hit the ground, but it had skittered only a few feet from him.  It sat there, spinning slowly on its hilt. Gideon knelt and snatched it up. It was little more than a mangled dagger now; perhaps a foot of jagged blade remained attached to the hilt.  The rest of the shattered blade burned like salt in the cuts running down his arms, even as his shield flickered involuntarily around them.

Then--behind Blackblade, behind Bolas, through the grimy haze of mana and smoke, Gideon spotted a pair of dark shapes moving behind the dais, climbing the steps.  Large shapes. Shapes Gideon recognized all too well.

There was yet one way to save Liliana, and himself, and everyone below.  The sword had shattered against the dragon's scales, but what little remained was sharp, and the metal felt hot and eager under his hands.  He glanced to the side as Liliana’s screaming reached a fever pitch, in time to see Liliana tear the cursed Veil from her face.  The Eternals around her shattered.

Gideon brought the ruins of Blackblade up into a guard position.

"Still you strive, little ant," Bolas boomed.  "It would be inspiring, if it weren't so tedious.  Are you going to try to slay the dragon _again_?"  He breathed a gout of flame at the Onakke spirits that had reached his face.  They twisted away, wailing.

"Well, I suppose it could work this time," Bolas drawled.  His tail lashed out, and Gideon had to drop to the ground to avoid being knocked flying.  The dragon rumbled a mocking chuckle.

"I doubt it, though.  You, Kytheon Iora--" He paused to snap at another of the Onakke spirits, then he tilted his head, and lowered his voice, an odd mockery of an intimate whisper.  " _You_ are no god."

Gideon didn’t have time to wonder whether Bolas had pulled the words from his mind or planted them in Hazoret long ago.  The dark pair had reached the summit of the citadel and loomed ominously behind Bolas, though it seemed the dragon had not yet noticed them, too intent on teasing his current prey.  

Gideon pushed himself back to feet.  "Neither are you," he said. He couldn't say why he had said it, and he said it quietly, no more than a murmur between heaving breaths.  But the dragon heard, and the dragon laughed.

Still--it was true, wasn't it?  Bolas was terribly powerful, yes.  He had slain gods. He had turned whole worlds to ash.  But he was not _divine_.  He was not a _god_.  Bolas was not Heliod, not Oketra, not even Erebos--he was a planeswalker, a mortal like Gideon or Jace or Chandra, a pretender, a _trespasser_ , whose hideous power came from stolen souls and stolen knowledge.  All the artifice and knowledge of all the worlds could not grant him godhood, only a hollow facsimile.  Gideon Jura had been born into a world rich in gods, and he now stood in the presence of false divinity.

"Pathetic," the dragon sneered.  "You're not even an _interesting_ hero."  His head descended like a striking snake, scattering the Onakke in his wake.

Gideon stepped sideways, pivoting out of the way as the great dragon's jaw closed inches from him with a snap like cracking timber.  Behind Bolas, the thing that had been Oketra reached out and grabbed the dragon's wing. Bolas’s eye, as long as Gideon's arm, slid open, searching both for its new attacker and for the prey it had missed.  Gideon twisted, pivoting back, bringing all the strength he had left to bear to plunge the shard of Blackblade into the dragon's roving eye. He struck--for Ravnica, for Amonkhet, for Zendikar and Kaladesh, for Alara and Vivien's Skalla and every other world the monster before him had lain to waste.  For Oketra and her kin, for the Ravnicans and planeswalkers who had perished this day.

 _Drink_ , Gideon implored the shard of Blackblade.   _Destroy_.   _Steal back everything he has stolen_.   _Strike him down, that he may never strike down another_.  Blackblade obliged; Gideon could feel its thrill of avaricious pleasure as it scrabbled and clawed its way through Bolas’s defenses to feast on the greatest meal it had ever known.

The omnipresent rumbling growl turned into an animalistic howl; the dragon's eyelid snapped shut around the sword, too late to protect the eviscerated eye, and Blackblade was ripped from Gideon's blood-slick hands as the dragon reared back into the waiting arms of what had been Oketra and Bontu.  Gideon fell backwards, cracking his head once more upon the dais, and watched dazedly as the great dragon's claws clutched at his ruined eye, fighting to pull the sword fragment out and extricate himself from the former gods' grasp at the same time. The damage was done. Through the aura spell, Gideon saw the dragon grab the now-golden hilt and yank.  Blackblade refused to give up its prize. The connection did not break as the blade was flung to the ground; a tether remained between dragon and sword, and Blackblade, of its own volition, tasting a sweet soul drenched in tantalizing power, _pulled_.  Once-Oketra and once-Bontu _pulled_.  The planeswalker aura around Bolas faded, wrenched away by God-Eternal and sword, and the last of the golden light disappeared into the shard of Blackblade like a noodle slurped into a hungry mouth.  

Bolas fell.  Gideon could not move out of the way in time.  His shield flickered spasmodically, reacting to the slivers of Blackblade embedded in his skin, and could not offer enough protection from the dead dragon’s bulk.  He realized with a punch-drunk smile that he would die here, crushed under the corpse.

Once-Oketra caught the dragon's falling body and tossed it aside.

Gideon thought he saw her skull face smile back at him, and he laughed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Gideon stabs one dragon, Jace has to negotiate with two

Jace ran up the steps of the citadel; he tried to take them two at a time, and now and again he slipped on the polished stone and had to catch himself.  Time was of the essence. He could hear the others behind him; he could feel their fear and uncertainty pressing up against his back. How had he come to lead the charge?

He reached the top and did not slow down, despite what he saw.

Liliana's face oozed where the Chain Veil had burned before she’d torn it off, and her right hand was simply _gone_ , all that remained a charred stump of bone jutting from her elbow. A stomach-churning sight on a day full of them.  The Veil was a puddle of blackened silver slag on the ground beside her. Jace could not tell if Liliana was alive and could not fathom how she could be.  Her skirts still smouldered.

_No time for that now._

Gideon lay on his back, white armor smeared red with blood.  Samut--the only person, somehow, who had beaten Jace to the top--knelt by his side, hand resting on his chest.  Was that a gesture you would make for the living or for the dead?

_No time for that now_.

The remaining Onakke spirits swooped and coalesced around the stolen sparks, dragging each one away for some unknown purpose.

_No time for that now_.

Bolas's desiccated corpse, a sight Jace had never quite allowed himself to hope to see.

_No time for that now_ .  It was the _other_ dragon Jace needed to deal with.

Ugin knelt, a clawed hand resting atop Bolas’s still head, eyes closed and mouth pulled into an unfathomable expression.  Anger? Grief? Jace couldn’t begin to guess.

Jace slid to a stop, gasping for air, and positioned himself between Ugin and Gideon, for all the good it would do if Ugin was here for nefarious ends. If Ugin chose to attack, Jace would provide an obstacle only in the most technical sense of the word; nevertheless, he stood between them, panting, trying to hide how badly his legs were shaking and trying to pretend it was only the run up the many stairs that had sent him trembling.

The telepathic scream when Bolas died had not been unexpected, even if it had been painful and deafening.  The other scream, though, the one that preceded Bolas’s death by mere seconds…Jace found himself, once again, uncertain whether Ugin was friend or foe, whether he had come to aid--or to find revenge.

Watching Gideon fall had not been half as bad as watching him get back up again, clutching the shattered remnant of a sword and standing before Bolas like a sapling tree before an avalanche.  He had looked so small in that moment that Jace had despaired--how foolish they had been to believe a single man with a sword, however brave the man, however magical the sword, could defeat a dragon, could defeat _Bolas_ , a god of gods...

_Call him back_.  _Make him run._   _There is no hope left_ , Jace thought, stomach sick.  Except...no, that wasn’t his mind’s voice.  There was a foreign quality to it, a crystalline hum.  The innumerable Eternals attacked only physically, and Jace had let his mental defenses slacken during the fight, so he had not spotted the intrusion when it happened.  But he spotted it _now_ , and he sent his mind crashing over the intruder like a wave, sweeping it into an isolated pool and binding it there.  The most dangerous place for a telepath was inside the mind of another telepath; Jace had learned _that_ on Amonkhet, and paid dearly for the lesson.  But he also knew now how powerful he could be in his own realm.

_Who are you?_ Jace demanded, pinning the intruder under the weight of his question.

Yet the intruder ignored the question, despite the compulsion.  _Call him back.  Nicol Bolas must not be slain!_

_Why?_ Jace demanded, but he was not so exhausted yet as to miss the implication of the intruder’s words: the intruder thought that Gideon _could_ slay Bolas.  Jace glanced to the top of the citadel, where a flash of scuffed white armor was just visible.  Hope, vulnerable and fragile, bloomed.

_He must not be slain.  True power never dies; it merely lies in wait for another opportunity.  Kill him here and he will one day be reborn, more terrible than before_.  The intruder squirmed and wriggled, clawing at the slick, smooth walls of its prison.

_What's the alternative?_ Jace asked.

_Imprisonment_.  _I will guard against his escape and prevent him ever troubling the multiverse again_.  Jace knew then who he was dealing with, recognized the crystalline hum of the intruder’s voice.

_How’d that work for the Eldrazi, Ugin?_

_He must not be slain!_ Ugin ceased throwing himself against the prison and _twisted_ , and Jace found himself holding down nothing more than a dead cluster of thoughts and impressions that dissolved into silt under the weight of his own mind.  The rest of Ugin, cut free, turned to another target. _Stop!_

And Jace reached out his own defenses, and turned aside the compulsion aimed at Gideon.

Ugin _howled_ , and Nicol Bolas fell.

 

"Jace Beleren," the silver-blue dragon greeted Jace without an ounce of warmth.  "You continue to be an untrustworthy ally. In fact, ‘ally’ might not be the correct term.  ‘Nuisance’, perhaps, a termite worming through my plans."

It had been a very long day already, and Jace was in no mood to play games, and suddenly he found he was very angry, and suddenly he found he didn’t feel small standing before the giant dragon.

"This is becoming a bad habit for you," Jace said, meeting the dragon's gaze.  "Swooping in after the battle's won and telling us we should have done something differently.”

“He will come back.  You know this, and yet you allowed--no, _insured_ \--his death.”

“Will he?  I have only your word on the matter.”  Behind Ugin's back, Jace could see Teferi and Karn arriving at Liliana's side.

The dragon’s eyes narrowed, and steam snorted from his nostrils.  “Do you take me for a liar?”

“Maybe.  I certainly don’t think you’re fully honest with _termites_ ,” Jace replied, shrugging.  “Ixalan was great, by the way.  Wonderful weather.”

Ugin’s eyes narrowed further, but he appeared to catch himself.  He steepled his fingers and lowered his head, and his voice turned soft, placating.  “I have seen him killed before. Death posed little challenge for him then. I was making alternative preparat--”

“You saw the beacon; you must have.  We all did. You could’ve been here hours ago.  You could’ve told us then. You could’ve been here when it _started_ ," Jace snapped.  "You weren't."

For the second time that day, he mourned the loss of the Guildpact powers.  Surely the Azorius had some law buried in one of their tomes--"Failure to Render Appropriate Aid to a Guild Representative in a Time of Crisis" sounded promising--that he could've used against the dragon.  How many lives would have been saved if Ugin had fought against the Eternals?

"Walking into an obvious trap is not--"

"It's done," Jace said, holding up his hands.  Steam trickled from Ugin's nose as Jace cut him off a second time, but the dragon did not otherwise move.  "Why are you here _now_?"  Behind Ugin, Teferi had worked some magic on Liliana.  Karn gathered her into his arms. Jace risked taking his attention from Ugin long enough to ask Teferi: _Is she alive?_

_Barely_ , came the reply.  _I have placed her in a slow-time bubble_.

Something thrilled in Jace’s chest, and he could not say whether it was terror or relief.

“There are precautions we must take if we are to ensure the rash actions of you and your compatriots do not lead to the rebirth of my brother and the undoing of all I’ve worked toward.  We will have to work quickly--”

“Bolas is your brother?” Jace tried to make it sound like it wasn’t an accusation.

“Do _not_ speak his name,” Ugin hissed.  He looked toward the other dragon’s corpse, as if afraid it might start moving.  “That is but one of the many precautions we must now take. And yes, he was my brother; I have spent my long years guarding the multiverse against his predations.”

The answer didn’t fully mollify Jace, and he now had even more questions than before, but the urgency of his anger was beginning to wear.  He’d never been able to stay angry for long, and curiosity to learn more took hold of him.

“How could he come back?  What precautions do we have to take?”

Ugin’s reply was cut off by a commotion on the steps.  The crowd of soldiers and arriving revelers in the square parted to allow Niv-Mizzet to pass. At least one of his wings was broken; a crowd of goblins on jetpacks swarmed and hovered about it, armed with glowing needles and syringes, apparently attempting to set the shattered bone.  It was odd watching the dragon walk. He lumbered like a bear, strangely graceless on the ground, and limped his way up the many stairs to the top of the citadel. Ripples passed between the dragons, a telepathic conversation Jace was not privy to.  He quashed the temptation to pry.

Ugin settled back on his haunches, apparently desiring to continue their conversation only when Niv-Mizzet arrived.  Niv-Mizzet, for his part, growled at the attending goblins as he heaved himself up the top steps. Up close, Jace was astonished at how much damage Bolas had done.  The frills around Niv-Mizzet’s head were bent and torn, and great patches of scales had been scraped off his neck and shoulders. Blood still ran in thin rivulets, though one of the goblins had smeared some sort of wound-closing paste on the cuts.

Ugin dipped his head at Niv-Mizzet in a gesture that reminded Jace of a bow, and Niv-Mizzet returned the gesture stiffly.  Niv-Mizzet turned a bloodshot eye on Jace. “You’re free to go, Mr. Beleren.”

“Sorry?”

“None of this concerns you,” Niv-Mizzet said.  Jace couldn’t tell if the dragon was looking down his nose at him, or whether that was simply an effect of their difference in size.  “You are a private citizen and thus have no authority to negotiate on Ravnica’s behalf. As Guildpact, that responsibility now falls to me.” 

“But--” Jace began to protest, then stopped.  He _wasn’t_ the Guildpact anymore.  He wondered if Niv-Mizzet saw him as a threat, a predecessor who might scheme to take the power of the Guildpact back, but dismissed the notion as ridiculous.  He _didn’t_ want the powers back--however much he still wanted to cite Ugin with something--and whatever precautions Ugin was so desperate to enact could be done without Jace’s assistance.  It wasn’t his concern. It wasn’t his responsibility.

He was free to go.

“It was nice to see you again,” Jace told Ugin, only slightly sarcastically.  He turned his back on the two dragons and looked out over the city, and despite the fatigue of battle his feet were light as he made his way down the steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a note to anyone considering grad school, it sucks and takes up all your writing time and then you have a chapter written for literal months that you can't post because you can't find fifteen minutes to edit.
> 
> I hope this doesn't come off as Ugin-bashing. I just can't conceive of a multiverse where Jace trusts Ugin even an inch after Zendikar/Ixalan.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it wasn't clear, this is just the work where I dump out all my frustrations with _War of the Spark_ and its sequel, and I don't really have any long-term plans for it and it's not getting my best efforts. _For Our Ghosts_ is my primary work at the moment, and it is currently cannibalizing my writing time and also any scenes from this work that also work in it.
> 
> Buuuuuuut I have a _lot_ of frustration with WotS to spread around...

Gideon could no longer remember his mother's face; he had been only seven the last time he saw her, and now all that remained was a crooked white smile and dark curls.  She had been young, he was fairly certain, although to a child’s eye all adults are old, and she had worn a perfume of cliff rose and poppies which he had never encountered again.  The scent clung to every surface in this amorphous dreamspace. They might have been standing in the small, dirt-floored lean-to where Gideon had spent his infancy, or walking through one of the many fields surrounding the city, or sitting at the fountain in the center of the Foreigner’s Quarter.  It did not matter; she was here, and even though waking he could not remember her face, every curve and freckle was rendered now in perfect detail.

“My Kytheon.”  She held his face between her hands as mothers did and looked proudly upon him.  She appeared young, as he would have known her, but her voice creaked with the weight of age.  “I knew you were destined for great things.”

“I only did what had to be done,” he said.  “I did what anyone would do.”

“Oh, child.  Humility is a virtue, so the gods tell us, but do not lose sight of the wondrous thing you have done.”

He whispered sadly, “This is a dream.”

“Yes,” she agreed.  She kissed his forehead, though even on tip-toe she should have been too short to reach.  Then she smiled, and tears welled in her eyes, and she brushed back his hair from his face.  “I never got to say goodbye.”

Kytheon could not answer her through the lump in his throat.  He wrapped his fingers around hers and rested his forehead against her hair, and they sat in silence.

 

Jace had been up since before sunrise, but still there was more work to do.  Azorius and Boros forces moved through the dead, separating Ravnicans to one side and planeswalkers to another.  The Ravnicans were identified by spirit-talkers, and families were contacted to find out what should be done with the bodies.  When families were lacking, the bodies were added to the massive pyre donated by the Conclave, waiting to be set ablaze in a great conflagration at sunrise.  Parties had broken out around the plaza, but the Boros kept them away from the pyre and the sorting of the dead, and most of the revellers stayed away anyway, mindful of the sacredness of the thing.

No one seemed to know what to do with the planeswalkers.  No spirit-talker could reach them, and so Jace started sorting through the corpses, feeling some inexplicable duty to do so.  Or rather, it wasn’t inexplicable at all, merely something he didn’t feel like thinking about right at that moment, not with the straight lines of dessicated bodies arrayed across the plaza.  He thought of his parents on Vryn, and how he had--knowing what was coming--refused to go to see them. He wouldn’t make them grieve him twice.

So he looked through pockets and weapons and bags for clues as to who each planeswalker had been and where they had come from.  It was a difficult puzzle, and realistically, for many, there was no solution. There was a vedalken with six fingers--but was he Kaladeshi, or was there another world somewhere that _also_ had six-fingered vedalken?  There was a woman whose robes reminded him of the robes Tamiyo wore, but he did not know enough of Kamigawa to be certain.  A few had some identifying mark--a necklace with _To my beautiful Daughter, Niela_ etched on the back, or a journal with _Property of Rio Sennec_ written on its cover--but most had nothing, only clothes.

He did the best he could to figure out who each planeswalker had been and took any trinket that might have sentimental value attached to it, marking each magically with a number and then recording it on a piece of paper with who it had belonged to and which plane he thought they had been from.  A half-formed plan hatched in his mind, to find where each had come from and inform their families what had transpired. It seemed the least he could do. And when he had gleaned all he could from their possessions, he took a pot of shimmering black ink and drew a sigil on their forehead, so that no Orzhov or Golgari necromancer could lay claim to their body or soul, and rolled their body up in linen squares, ready for the pyre.  He could not know what funeral rites each planeswalker desired, and there was no way to take their bodies home regardless, nor any way to know where _home_ truly was.  A Ravnican ceremony would have to be enough.

His efforts were aided when another planeswalker joined him.  The man introduced himself as Dack, correctly interpreting Jace’s blank stare as a confession that Jace couldn’t recall who he was, and explained how he could touch an object and see how it was used, and perhaps who it had belonged to.  He had also been to many planes, and many different ones than Jace had, and between the two of them they were able to identify a great deal. Not all, but many. _Lani, from Massiodore.  Lambar, who had a son and two daughters on Akoria.  Nolke, from Vohe_.

Tamiyo joined them after a time and her expertise was invaluable. Nissa and Vraska joined soon after, and the five of them worked through the night, quietly and dutifully recording the dead to the best of their ability.  _Zenajena, who had swam in the seas of Ciamothra.  Dwyn, from Valla. Pfen, who carried a dagger from Yondu and a bow from Ergamon but was from neither_.  Nissa carried each body reverentially to the pyre when it was ready.  The sounds of celebration, laughter and song, came to them, and the smell of frying food, the flashes of Izzet pyrotechnics, but the group stayed to their task and their quiet, solemn corner of the plaza, speaking only enough to coordinate their efforts.

They finished as the sky began to lighten with the promise of dawn.  The pyre was lit, and a Selesnyan delegation led a prayer and a hymn for those still watching.  Jace mumbled his way through an invocation; there were no prayers for planeswalkers, so far as he was aware, but _may your spirit find its way home_ seemed appropriate enough.

Two hundred forty two slain planeswalkers.  Of that, they’d managed to roughly identify sixty eight, from as many different planes.  Jace had been to several; he’d heard of a few more. Bringing home news of their fate would take some time.  But--Bolas was dead, and he was no longer Guildpact, so what else did he have to do? 

 

 


End file.
